A helicopter swoops over a sun-kissed marina, where young couples stroll along a waterfront promenade, between the masts of sailing boats and the chiselled concrete ziggurats of dashing modern flats. Up above, elevated walkways carry families from their front doorsteps to the futuristic town centre, where a medical facility stands on stilts above a lake, and parades of shops line a network of glistening canals.
It looks like an advertisement for a luxury resort in the south of France, but these were the plans for Thamesmead, the new town drawn up in the 1960s by the architects of the Greater London council for a 650-hectare swathe of Thames estuary marshland. As a promotional film trumpeted at the time, it was to be a place where 60,000 people would live “in environmental conditions unmatched by anything that has existed before”. It would be a world of clean, bright, spacious homes built with modular, factory-made concrete panels, with pedestrian life safely raised above traffic, and the delights of waterside living available to all in this cockney Venice-on-Thames.
